Helmets & Basins: an *official* welcome

When you find a foreign word in a social media post, video captions, or a book (if you’re one of the few who still read them), what do you do?  Do you glaze over it and keep going, figuring out the meaning after the fact?  Do you ignore it entirely?  Or do you look at it, wonder, and go find what it actually means?

In one of my recent contemporary literature classes, the answer that most classmates gave was that words like “geburtenkontrolle” (hint: it's German) were completely ignored. Their meaning didn’t matter enough to merit the five seconds of pulling up Google Translate and typing in the odd combination of letters.  I think that part of our greatest problem is we’re no longer used to being challenged.  With everything automatically translating into your language (as a native English speaker, this is especially true for me) there is no searching for understanding.  It’s just provided. Automatic captioning, Instagram translating a reel before I can tell it whether I want to watch it in the original French or not.

In my line of study, that does a great disservice to the power of language.

I recently read Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and proceeded to have a two-hour discussion with my friends about the use of the word “basihelm” for the basin Quixote believed to be the Helmet of Mambrino. In the original Spanish, the word was something like basihelmo, a word Sancho creates to placate Quixote’s warped reality of the foot washing basin (trans. E. Grossman, 2003, p. 390).  The flexibility of language allows us to create these new words and combinations—and each language’s capacity to do this is different!

French doesn’t follow the same rules as English or Estonian or Danish, making each one contain a very different space for innovation and creativity.

This brings me to my formal introduction to this blog: I hope writers and critics alike are encouraged to submit and showcase their thoughts here about why writing is a uniquely human practice.  Our ability to manipulate language is why storytelling has persisted throughout time and why fiction & poetry haven’t dropped off as if they were a sort of fad or phase in our human development.  And now more than ever, we should be protecting the practice of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and innovating in the absence of ChatGPT and technological aides.

I'm on a mission to lean into the basihelm parts of language, showcasing the value of linguistic diversity in storytelling.

Here’s to many more innovations of the figurative basin & Helmet of Mambrino—welcome to Words under the Bridge! Thank you for being here.